Chapter XV: Conclusion 327 (8)

In constructing formal planes with definite tones whose values are mechanical and absolute, the Cubists have missed that possible subjectivity of movement which, in its highest degree, colour alone can give. They have constructed only primitively ordered bas-reliefs each plane and line of which has a distinct direction. And this direction, no matter what is added to or subtracted from the work, will remain the same. The planes are consequently static and absolute. In the great art of Cezanne there is only a relative absolutism. By any alteration in one of his pictures, the entirety is shattered: the direction of each plane and line is changed to concur with the needs of a different order. This is because Cezanne's work possesses the poise which is demanded in the highest art. And this poise is what Cubism, with its rigid lines and planes, has entirely missed. Illustratively the Cubists' conception was new, compositionally it was old; and an art cannot be significantly renovated save from the bottom upward. The foundation of all art is composition, and the only means which can be accepted as vital are those which increase the artist's power to express that which is more inherent in painting than in any of the other arts, namely: rhythmic form in three dimensions. That the Cubists failed to develop such means may be perceived by comparing the compositions of Picasso's "red" period, which were but slightly cubic and which contain a certain amount of arbitrary form, with his late and wholly cubic black-and-white drawings and paintings such as are seen at Kahnweiler's back of the Madeleine. The latter are almost wholly flat. His Femme a la Mandoline marks the transition from the early period to the late one. In all his pictures one finds a charming rhythm of lights and darks and a slight comprehension of surface form. But he never goes very deep. Even in his sculptured heads, while there is order, there is no form in the compositional sense.

To ascribe Picasso's Cubism to so childish an impulse as a desire to square an academic drawing is both untrue and unjust. Some have pointed to Duerer as his artistic forbear merely because Duerer once described a number of curves which he said could be made into a human body and drew a block-diagram of box-like forms which he said was the basis for the body's construction. But no relationship exists between these two artists. Cubism's first consideration was to cover the surfaces of its canvases with form, thus doing away with the empty spaces so prevalent in all art works, spaces which Cezanne left blank. To accomplish this logically it was necessary either to introduce superfluous figures, or to stretch the ones already present into impossible distortions. Since the elimination of all unessentials was the keynote of the day, Picasso decided to make multiplex his essentials. Herewith was born the Cubist conception of breaking up the model for the attainment of a more complete work and one in which there would be no dead planes. At first an extensive linear direction, which started at the lower frame, was carried up into the background by the demarcation of a shadow or an object, for the purpose of holding tightly together two or more forms. Later, in order to facilitate this procedure of multiplying their models, the Cubists began to walk round them. This process unchained them from the slavery to a single model and from the given contour of an absolute subject. At the same time it permitted them a fantastically arbitrary composition, and made their expression more dependent on the personality of the artist, and less contingent on preconceived ideas, than ever before.

Cubism expressed a laudable tendency toward an aristocratic vision as opposed to the popular vision of reality. Its pictures therefore became doubly complex, for in the contemplation of the picturisation of our mental process, another process is started which is far more complicated than the first. Herein we have an explanation for the fact that Cubism is incomprehensible to the untutored person who regards art as an imitation of nature. The very word "form" is aesthetically meaningless to the average spectator. In order to experience its meaning, aside from organisation, one's attention has to be given over to the object's weight, its force, its circumferential volume. A form in a picture cannot be considered merely as to its employment and its utilitarian destiny, or from the standpoint of one's experience with it. To the great artist an object exists as a volume with which to fill a given space. He completely forgets its _raison d'etre_ in life, and views it only as a means for tightening a picture's order. To this extreme of pure artistic conception the Cubists never attained. And while Cezanne advanced from Courbet's surface realism to the realism of causes, the Cubists were unable to progress along similar lines. They simply translated abstraction into terms of concrete expression. The profound reasons for dynamism in art were left untouched by them. They endeavoured to portray objectively an abstract process, expecting its mere portrayal to be dynamic.

The dynamic, however, cannot be rendered by imitation. It is as impossible of attainment by this method as in the dancing-girl canvases of Degas. Behind the emotional power of nature there is a great abstract force; and the effect of dynamism can be got only when this force is expressed. Then the result is a natural outgrowth of a cause. Otherwise we have only a detached effect which does not lead us back into the undercurrents of causation. When a Cubist picture is interesting it will at most make us puzzle over the application of its theories; it can never move us aesthetically by the sheer power of its methods. The one dynamic element which the Cubists have in common with Cezanne--namely: the modification of lines and forms through contact with other lines and forms--they have nullified by constructing with rigid tones the planes which the lines delimit, thereby making their planes frozen and immovable. Because ignorant of the functionality of colour the Cubists were unable to present, at one and the same time, perfect mobility, planar solidity and indefinite depth. As a result of too much study of Cezanne's and El Greco's composition and too little study of Michelangelo and Rubens, they failed to achieve, even with the great arbitrariness and convenience of their means, a profound composition which is a rhythmic order of volume, as distinguished from a simple organisation of parts. Their accomplishments do not realise the promises of their programme because their theories were too inflexible. Cubism was too tightly bound by rigid systems and methods to produce plastically significant results.

The Cubists' greatest _apport_ to art (not in theory but in achievement) is their almost total abolition of the painter's slavery to nature. It was but a step from Matisse to the complete elimination of recognisable objects, and though Cubism did not cover the entire distance, it nevertheless made an advance toward that pure expression which Cezanne saw was inevitable. Even today the followers of this school are beginning to realise their early mistakes and to throw off their self-imposed restrictions. They are launching forth into colour and are seeking expression in purely arbitrary form. But these new developments have not yet been productive of a new artistic worth. Indeed, it is doubtful if they will lead to important results so long as the geometrical phase of Cubism is adhered to, and so long as the Cubists ignore the dynamic possibilities of colour. In its present status Cubism can only continue striving toward a style that goes deeper than tonal prettiness and lyric immobility. Already Picasso has passed out of painting altogether. An artist with his extraordinary gift to do anything superficially well could not remain anchored to an idea after the novelty of its method had worn off. He is not a man who is the slave of thought, but rather an obstinate artist with a spark of genius who has passed through many different stages with a rapidity born of astounding dexterity and cleverness. Many of his early female heads rival in sheer classic beauty the best of the Renaissance painters. Some of his pen-and-ink drawings are the most sensitive of modern times. There are caricatures done by him which closely approach the fantasy of a Goya. Indeed it may be justly said that he is as great an illustrator as Raphael. And in this analogy lie both his glory and his limitation. Like Raphael he lacks that profound penetration of exteriors which would permit him a comprehension of his greater influences--of El Greco, for instance. But, with a glance, he can sound the depths of a Toulouse-Lautrec, a Steinlen or a piece of negro sculpture.

Picasso's inability to conceive two elements at once and to construct a complicated development of composition, is exemplified in his earlier work, first, by his adherence to certain single colours at different stages of his career, secondly, by the extreme simplicity of his circus folk, and thirdly, by his figure compositions which, though they are never tedious or dull and possess an almost nervous _sensibilite_, are limited to one or two human forms. Again Picasso's limitation of compositional conception is attested to by his stubborn use of brown and white in his latest Cubist pictures, by his employment of line alone in the drawings of his architectural-plan stage, and by his application of objects at hand to the clay blocks which mark his latest metamorphosis. But no matter what his medium or style, he remains essentially unchanged. In all his work is felt the superficial lightness of one who conceives order only as an ornament to decoration and who is interested in three-dimensional form merely as an after-thought. His sculpture is but his painting in a solider medium. It is broken up into planes and organised as to each contour in exactly the same manner as is his work in oils. The difference between Picasso, the sculptor, and Matisse, the sculptor, is the difference between a man who has a slight genius for rhythm and a block order, and one who has a slight genius for characterisation and a perfect ensemble. The art of Picasso, having to do with form as decoration, is admirably adapted to sculpture. The art of Matisse, being flat and dealing with colour as decoration, is inexpressible in clay.

Fernand Leger, with the exception of Picasso, is the most genuinely talented artist of the Cubist movement. His work at first was much less radical than that of his confreres and gave greater evidence of depth because it had never completely shaken off perspective. His canvases, Les Toits and Maisons et Fumees, represent little more than a highly artistic angularisation of a subject which, being angular in itself, lends itself admirably to Cubistic treatment. Leger's method is to place in the foreground large planes which serve as a frame for the actual picture which is seen between them as through a tunnel. By this device he creates a diversity of form and with it a recognisable depth. His paint at first was light in tone, but is now taking on colour. Since his first Cubist exhibits he has made a logical progress in rhythmic conception, and if his past development can be assumed as a criterion of the future it is safe to prophesy that eventually he will be the most significant man of the original group. Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque and Francis Picabia are all prominent figures in the Cubist movement. Gleizes manifested his first Cubist tendencies by giving form a solid angularity, thereby making it precise. His canvases are devoid of interest because so slightly creative. His well-known L'Homme au Balcon appears to us today almost Futuristic in conception. In fact, it was exposed at the _Salon d'Automne_ in 1912 one year after the Futurist show; and when we compare it with his early and less significant Les Baigneuses, with which it was hung, it gives the impression of having been the result of a sudden and enthusiastic inspiration from the newer men. Later his work grew broader and simpler, but in it there is little or no composition. Even the order is that of the straight line. Metzinger is a better artist. In him is a greater order, although, as in Gleizes, it is produced by the straight line. During his artistic beginnings he was under the sway of negro sculpture and painted in small planes of light and dark. Later, turning from the influence of negro antiquity, he directed his talent on nature and began to interpret form into angularities. His La Femme au Cheval, done in 1912, was a distinct step, both as to form and composition, in advance of the naturalistic vision; and his Le Port is one of the finest examples of the Cubist theory of synchronous picturisation and interpenetrating lines and masses. Duchamp, a slighter talent than either Leger or Gleizes, is the Whistler of the movement. In his pictures are less form, less composition and less comprehension of volume than in any other Cubist work except that of Juan Gris whose lethargic canvases have not even the interest of an Aime Morot. Braque has added nothing to Cubism. He followed Picasso closely, and his whole creative impetus seems derived from the latter's canvases.

Picabia, despite his popularity, is but a second-rate Cubist. He was quick to grasp the fact that the Cubists were working away from illustration, and attempted to step beyond them. Where they had endeavoured to bring about the precise stylisation of form, he merely dealt in ribbon-like patches of colour which were without contour, shape, proportion or volume. His canvases wherein many of these strange amorphous hachures are grouped, have a highly bizarre appearance but are only remotely intelligible. He used almost monochromatic schemes, as did his master Picasso, and continued this style of work until his fellow Cubists, by diligent research and serious study, had approached the abstract appearance of his surfaces. Picabia then found a new impetus in the works of the Futurists--an impetus toward movement expressed, not by bodies, but by line. This Futurist influence resulted in his making flat pictures of many sharply defined silhouettes tinted red, green, blue and grey. His lines serve only to accentuate the chaos of his ensemble, for in his work there is no definite conception of the whole.

Cubism's possibilities as a dynamic illustrative art have never been adequately exhausted, and, since the angular mode is rapidly disappearing as a result of newer and more vital visions, they probably never will. Picasso was its high priest up to two years ago, at which time colour, coming back on the wave of a counter-revolution, threw most of the Cubists into its application. Robert Delaunay was responsible for this reaction. Early in 1912 he came forward with a very large canvas entitled Ville de Paris, whose surface was broken up into many angular planes after the Cubist fashion. But instead of depicting forms and formal relations, the picture was painted in greys and high colours solely as a means of surface filling. Its contours recalled El Greco despite their being disguised by triangular dislocations. The picture represented three mammoth Graces standing before a distant Paris landscape, and so transparent and ethereal was it that it seemed as though a breath could have dispersed it into mist. It possessed the delicate loveliness of a butterfly, and the eye, in running over its glittering and pretty array of colours, was fascinated as in the contemplation of a kaleidoscope. But the canvas, while provoking a distinct visual pleasure, failed to arouse any aesthetic enjoyment.

Delaunay's L'Equipe de Cardiff the following year was equally unemotional. Fundamentally this picture was the same as his Ville de Paris, though treated differently as to surface. The same up-shooting type of _svelte_ beauty as formerly bodied forth in his three Graces was here repeated in the bodies of the athletes, but there was in addition a very slight surface rhythm; and the colour, because its application was broader, had a greater fascination. In his Ville de Paris, not daring to paint a naturally drawn nude with the colours his sense of prettiness and ornament dictated, he fragmentised the surface by luxating the lines. Thus, while the sensitive contour was retained, the picture appeared as if viewed through a polygonal prism. In the second canvas this artifice for the sake of charm was discarded. The players were dressed in solid colours of bright pigment; the sky was blue-violet; the Eiffel tower, eminently appreciable, stood to the right; down the centre of the canvas was a large _affiche_ in yellow; and overhead soared an aeroplane. The transition from a hackneyed theme to a modern one was the result of the artist's desire to pass beyond the methods of the day to more vigorous ones.

Before Delaunay's decisive work was done he had been influenced by the Neo-Impressionists, Cezanne, the Cubists and, in his two mentioned early works, by the Impressionists. Indeed these pictures are the expression of Impressionist methods broadened and extended to suit the dimensions of his canvases. His cityscapes with the Eiffel tower as the principal object are interesting though not profound, and such canvases as the Route de Laon and Les Tours are so dainty they seem breathed onto the canvas. He is essentially a decorator in that he works always in two dimensions. This surface quality enters into all art, but in itself it is never significant. Only when it is a _result_ of ordered plasticity does it have power to move us. In Delaunay, however, there exists no fundamental order. Consequently his power is strictly limited. His desire is to make decoration which will be profound, instead of profound composition which will result in decoration. By thus reversing the natural order, effects are considered before causes; and only by the dynamism of causes can we be made to feel beauty. Beauty such as his is merely prettiness: it is only the objective mask of beauty, and is of no more aesthetic importance than a view of nature. The true beauty of a work of art is subjective; it is the effect of one's having sensed the accumulated and sequential aspects of co-ordinated expression. Herein lies the difference between aesthetic emotion and the pleasure aroused by a sunset, a stage setting or a dramatic story. When one is able to penetrate finally into art, neither dolour nor depression results, but always a feeling of exultation and joy, for by one's intellectual comprehension one has been physically aroused by a dynamic force, not merely moved by a scene or story which sets in motion the associative processes.

To the inadequate comprehension of this psychological truth is attributable the failure of the Cubists and of Delaunay. The latter strove to preserve the individuality of his work under the name of Orphism, and later under the designation of Simultaneism. But his temperamental kinship to Picasso and the Cubists is too obvious to be denied by nomenclature. Even his latest work, while more abstract and more luminous, is at most secessionistic. His canvas hung in the _Salon des Independants_ in 1914 was Cubism translated into light colours and twisted into curves and circles. Delaunay's wife, Madame Delaunay-Terk, follows him closely in inspiration and application, but her pictures are less ordered than his. The American, Bruce, once an imitator of Matisse and later of Cezanne, has joined the Simultaneist ranks; and Frost, another American, is an ardent disciple of Delaunay. The orthodox Cubists had passed colour by, but its reappearance in the Orphists-Simultaneists was a significant augury. Though it was not understood by them as an element capable of organic functioning, its mere presence was an inspiration and a call to all genuine artists to penetrate its meaning in relation to the intensification of form.

XII

FUTURISM

The dramatic enhancement of painting by line so well understood by the ancients, and the literary intensification of subject-matter by colour foreshadowed by the primitives and made more conscious by Delacroix, reached their highest development in the theories of Kandinsky and the Futurists. With Delacroix's comments concerning the harmonising of line and colour with subject and Seurat's and Signac's subsequent addenda to these comments, began scientific observation in painting. So long as these theories remained secondary to the great truths of composition they were admissible, because they had to do only with the unimportant ornamentation of an aesthetic organisation. But when, as in Kandinsky and the Futurists, they became the all in all of the artist's ambitions, they ceased to produce painting, and gave birth only to bad music, as in the Russian, and to bad poetry, as in the Italians. But while the Futurists' work had little to commend it to the discriminating spectator, their ideas were interesting and inspiring, and it is from their manifestos that has come what little influence they have exerted. Their pictures are neither pretty nor agreeable, while Kandinsky's, to the contrary, possess dainty and pleasing traits. In both cases the pictures are puzzles to be deciphered at length: they are expressions of moods brought about by half veiling reality and by making symbolically concrete an abstract force or cause.

In music where the form is an abstract result of concrete causes and in literature where the form is wholly abstract and represented by symbols, moods can be easily expressed, for they are the natural outgrowth of the media of these two arts. But in painting and sculpture, which are the visual arts wherein the form itself is concrete, emotion can be provoked only by a plastic poise of subjective weights. The balance and opposition of such weights or volumes when rhythmically organised give rise to complete aesthetic satisfaction and engender a feeling of finality which encompasses both line and colour. The Futurists, as did Delacroix and Seurat, count on "force-lines" to express an emotion, thereby branding themselves two-dimensional artists. And their desire to represent an emotion of objectivity on canvas places them at once in the ranks of illustrators. The highest art has nothing to do with objective reality whether as a spectacle or as a means to sensation. It is true that painting, in becoming pure, will eventually incorporate the associative emotions, but these emotions will be the psychological results of abstract form, not memorial experiences produced by cognitive objects. And the line, of which we have heard so much, will then become a direction and equality of pure form; it will no longer be simply an indication on a flat surface by means of a mark. The Futurists did not strive for purity. Rather did they emphasise an irrelevant side of painting. They declared themselves the renovators of subject-matter. Their whole ambition worked toward that end; and it is from that standpoint they must be judged.

In arriving at their conclusions many necessities of aesthetic emotion were sensed. Their most important statement, and one which, because of the dearth of significant art criticism, had not previously been set down, is that the person who contemplates a picture should not feel himself a mere observer of the events taking place in the painted work, but one of the principal actors in the canvas. In illustration such empathy is impossible unless the work is wholly and ultimately synthesised as to volume, colour, line, direction, size and subject. No such work has ever been produced because all the dramatic uses of these elements have never been understood by one man. That there are hundreds of canvases which entrain us into their ramifications is indisputable, but the aesthetic emotion we feel in them has to do with formal line alone, not with the perfect concord of line, form and subject. Marinetti and his group have striven earnestly to accomplish this difficult feat, but in every instance have failed. The explanation of their theories has far more to do with the emotion their pictures arouse in us, than has the actual application of these theories to canvas. They state that perpendicular, undulating and worn-out lines attached to hollow bodies express languor and discouragement; that confused, somersaulting lines, straight or curved, confounded into suggested gestures of appeal or haste, express the chaotic agitation of sentiments; that horizontal, jerky lines which brutally cut into semi-obscured faces, and bits of broken, irregular landscape give us the sensation of one departing on a journey. But while all this may be true, it has nothing to do with the aesthetic emotion which in painting grows entirely out of the dynamic use of the elements inherent in that art.

The desire of many modern painters and theorists to introduce into their own art emotions derived from the other arts results, first, from the modern ambition to intensify each of the arts, and secondly, from certain observations in aesthetic fundamentals, which have led artists little by little toward a vague realisation that the basis of all the arts is identical. But in this synthesis of the arts there is nothing new. The Futurists, in attempting to fuse poetry and painting, are many decades too late to lay claim to originality. Numerous attempts--all of them failures--have been made along similar lines. Wagner's was the most conspicuous. Then there were Sadikichi Hartmann, Madame Mary Hallock, Rene de Ghil, Arthur Rimbaud and recently Alexander Scriabine, all of whom commingled the different arts in an attempt to produce intensity. Commendable as these efforts for a hybrid expression may be, they are a futile expenditure of energy until the arts have been more precisely understood; and it is worth noting that those who have tried to coalesce them have been, in nearly every instance, the ones who understand none of them profoundly. The Futurists prove no exception. Their misapprehension of painting is analogous to that of Degas who, in picturing the dance, imagined that the spectator, by contemplating its static representations, would experience its rhythm.

The emotion of movement which the Futurists wish to call up can never be produced by disordered and tumbling lines. The effect is chaos. Movement grows out of the placement and displacement of volumes. It is a result of rhythmic organisation. We are conscious of movement in a human body when a position or pose is shifted, and we are conscious of it _only during the process of shifting_. Should we look at a body in one position, close our eyes during its change of attitude, and then behold it completely altered, we should not experience a sensation of action at all. But if the static points of movement present themselves to us with sufficient rapidity they produce the effect of continuous movement, as in the simulacra of the kinematograph. Otherwise we record merely the result of the change of position--not the act of changing itself. In a Michelangelo statue we see at first glance only a solid rigid mass; but the moment we begin mentally to reconstruct the form, we sense the opposition of volume-direction and the delicate poise of weights which overhang hollows and which are proportionally exaggerated in order to give a greater emotion of struggling forces. Then, our will guiding our eye, the mind translates to us physically the statue's expansion and contraction, the withheld completion of absolute balance, the approximation to equilibrium: and it is only after we have passed through discords and struggles and complicated developments--in other words, after we have striven for physical completion--that the finality comes as a satisfying consummation, like the knowledge of a tremendous task, long laboured over, brought to perfect and final accomplishment.

Is not the desire for an emotion, so completely reflective of the very undercurrents of life's forces, worthier of an artist's aim than the desire for the momentary sensation that someone is going away or that one is looking on at a dance? The emotional depictions of such episodes are at best but remote reflexes of reality. Our participation in a dance, for instance, is infinitely more intense than the Futurists' kinematic representation of it. In the actual experience one not only sees chaos but can touch the swirling forms, blink at the lights, smell the perfumes and hear the noise and music. In other words, one is moved to sensation or feeling by the physical forces themselves. To the true artist these physical forces are only his weapons, never his ends. And it is only through their intelligent use in the production of form that aesthetic emotion results. The superficial portrayal of effects, whether mental or physical, can never lead us inward to their causes. Any result is simply the dead end of a force, like the sea-weed a submarine volcano has thrown to the surface of the ocean. Art, being the causative force itself, should bring about the upheaval whose final manifestation is complete and satisfying. In great painting the spectator is led through every step of kinetic energy from chaos to order. When he emerges he has undergone a colossal dynamic experience. After all, energy is the ultimate physical reality.

The Futurists, it is true, strove sedulously for dynamism. Several of the titles of their later canvases contain the word. But their consistent misinterpretation of Leibniz's doctrine led them into the most superficial statements of the laws of force. By confusing action with movement and tempo with rhythm, and by constantly juggling causes and effects, they never arrived at a basic exposition of energy. In contemplating their pictures we experience only visual confusion. There is no movement because there is no static foil, no consummation. There is no dynamism because there is no suggestion of the inherent force which all substance involves. Let us assume the hypothesis that it is possible to photograph a kinematic force in movement. The Futurists' pictures wherein the representation of dynamism is attempted, as in Dynamisme d'une Auto, there is a series of these hypothetical photographs each of which has caught a segment of immobility, as any snap-shot catches some static pose of a moving object. By super-imposing each of these images successively on the other the Futurists imagine that a state of action is created. But even were this the case the picture would be innocent of dynamism. Again, Futurism claims not to paint maladies but their symptoms and results. Admittedly therefore it works against its own gropings for dynamism, for symptoms and results are the outgrowth of causes, and as such can have only an objective interest. Would the Futurists maintain, for instance, that, by portraying a head from many viewpoints on the same canvas, they can give us the emotion of a head turning? Even were it possible thus to extend the contemplation of pictures into time, the effect of a series of dissimilar profiles would be no more convincing than that obtained by a slowly moving cinematograph film. Should we grant that by such a device the effect of movement resulted, it would depend entirely upon which end of the movement the eye alighted first whether the head moved one way or the other. And if the picture was a perfect organisation the change of direction would throw every part of the canvas out of gear.

Considering Futurism purely from the standpoint of illustration we still are unable to justify its aims. In painting a picture of a person setting forth upon a journey from a railway station, the Futurist represents the departure by means of horizontal, fleeting and jerky lines, half-hidden profiles, the station's interior, the engine, etc. Then by introducing into the canvas bits of landscape and other incidentals which depict the thoughts of the person about to depart, the artist endeavours to call up the same mental state in the spectator of the canvas. The associative process of the human mind, however, makes such a proceeding unnecessary, because in beholding a simple, even an academically pictured, scene of someone entering a train amid the confusion and haste of passengers and guards, the spectator involuntarily calls up the landscape running past, the telegraph poles jerking by, the clanging of the bell, the shouts of attendants, the shuffling of many feet and the hiss of steam. In setting these things down the Futurists succeed only in limiting a highly imaginative person's thoughts by restricted visions of objectivity, just as in the theatre a producer, by placing many _papier mache_ trees and rocks and fibre grass about the stage, circumscribes the onlooker's imagination. The Greeks, whose theatrical presentations were sufficiently intense to evoke an imaginative _milieu_, did not need factitious properties: but the theatrical Belascos must necessarily make their settings absolute and meticulously realistic. A Tintoretto needs no such tricks to strengthen its emotive power; but the Futurists, unable to move us by dynamic canvases, need recourse to dramatic tricks. At most their pictures could be significant only as auxiliaries to literary texts.

The Futurists' contention that all modern art should have as a point of departure an entirely modern sensation is wholly tenable, but they mistake the fact that a modern sensation is merely the sensation which pertains specially to the contemporary man. It has nothing to do innately with the delineation of an automobile or an aeroplane. The modern aesthetic spirit goes deeper. It implies the expression of an emotion by use of the latest refinements and researches in the medium of an art. In painting it is not limited to the illustrative portrayal of a novelty. Were this the case any painter who confined himself to the picturisation of the latest dreadnaughts and the highest skyscrapers would be the pioneer of a new expression. In order to express himself in a modern manner, an artist needs only to have divested himself of all predilections for antiquity, to have subdued all conscious desire to will himself into the bodies of an ancient people, and to have seen the error of the childish maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. Any painter free from tradition, with a comprehension of aesthetic movement and an ability to apply it, will produce canvases which, though they have no radical theory behind them, will be as distinctly modern as those of the Futurists. Modernity has to do with methods and mental attitude. It is in no wise related to subject-matter.

Consider, for instance, the famous Futurist statement that "a running horse has not four legs, but twenty." Then contemplate Balla's picture, Dog and Person in Movement, to which this theory is applied. Neither the dog nor the person seems to move at all. They are static figures with blurred triangles resembling lace where their legs should be. Such a juvenile artifice to give the effect of movement is certainly not modern or even novel. Long prior to the Futurists, caricaturists and comic journalistic draughtsmen sought to express action by placing circular lines round the wagging tails of dogs or by drawing long sweeping lines behind a swiftly moving figure to indicate from what direction it had come and the rapidity of locomotion. Such inventions are outside the field of aesthetics. They have to do only with slow optical action. But the modification of objects in contact with others, of which Cezanne wrote, is a profound postulate of organisation. It creates a poise of volume which causes us to experience an emotion of movement. The Futurists' contrivance of endowing a horse with twenty legs precludes any possibility of their calling up forcibly a running horse, for only the legs seem to move, as of a horse in a treadmill. Save for the pictorial side of a picture so presented there is nothing in it of interest to us: and our memory of an actual horse clashes with the vision of a multipedalian one.

The Futurists' statement, however, that a picture's lines should subjectively drag the spectator into the centre of the canvas, where he will personally experience the rhythmic interplay of forms, is not only pertinent but expresses an absolute aesthetic necessity. Pictures which do not so affect the beholder have failed as great art. But though the Futurists were the first to give succinct utterance to this shibboleth, the practice of constituting a work of art so that the spectator was transposed into its stress and strain, had been going on ever since great composition came into painting. One cannot study a Michelangelo or a Rubens without feeling, even to the point of physical fatigue, the struggle of their finally harmonised volumes. This does not hold true of the Futurists' work. In studying their pictures our eyes alone become tired; and, though we succeed in unravelling the involutions of their pictures, there is for us no recompense of emotional satisfaction. Action in itself has little charm for us, and action is what the paintings of Futurism, in their ultimate expression, are founded on. But while action may attract us when expressed by an interesting and sympathetic personality, as in the paintings of Henri and in the sculpture of Rude, there is in Futurism no actional sensation or explicit element of deep enjoyment that we cannot obtain in greater intensity by gazing upon a busy thoroughfare, or by watching the landscape from a swiftly moving train, or by attending a dance. Even the chaos of a Futurist painting does not present the interest of the Flight Turning a Corner from Keion's panoramic roll of the Hogen Heiji war, or the prints of Moronobu, or even The Heavenly Host by the primitive Guariento. All these works, while they represent action, are also ordered. And order, which the Futurists lack, is more than an arbitrary ingredient in art. Just as the eternal desire in life is for something positive and absolute, so the attempt at order in painting is an outgrowth of the desire to make a picture complete and satisfying.

There is no doubt that the Futurists exerted much good in imbuing the artists of the day with a greater consciosity and in showing them, by an elaborate critical prospectus, the error of their ways. Futurism quieted the animadversions the modernist painters were hurling at Monet and his school, by pointing out that, to react against Impressionism by adopting pictorial laws which antedated it, was futile, and that the only way to combat it seriously was to surpass it. The Futurists, however, were unable to fulfil their proposition. They were, in fact, the abstract perpetuators of Impressionism through the Cubists who represented its formal side. The man who surpassed Impressionism was Cezanne. Furthermore, the Futurists chided the Cubists for painting from models, whether in squares, cubes or circles; and thus turned the light of analysis on the actual achievements, and away from the theories, of Picasso and his followers. The consequence was that for a short time the Cubists became somewhat Futuristic. Then, the strong impetus slowly ebbing out, the two schools gradually approached each other. Futurism has taken on a somewhat Cubistic mien; and the Cubists, having profited by the Futurists' teachings and having partially divorced themselves from the model, have begun to seek expression in Orphism and Synchromism. The work of Boccioni and Carra has assumed a wholly abstract appearance, and is much more interesting than formerly.

The methods of Futurism have their provenience in many preceding art movements. One finds in this school's canvases cubes, spots, divisionistic technique and wholly academic drawing; some of the pictures are monotonously brown and grey, while others possess the acid colouring of Neo-Impressionism. But aside from their work the Futurists proved a salutary event in modern art. The painting of the day needed just such a cataclysm to turn its eyes from the contemplation of partial traits to a more encompassing vision. Their motto might be the saying of Mallarme: "To name is to destroy, but to suggest is to create." Their art is largely one of suggestion. Their initial mistake was in supposing that the depiction of mental states would recall the causes of those states. Life would indeed be monotonous if in it there was no struggle. We could never appreciate its consummations were we ignorant of the travail which brought them about. The Futurists present, as it were, the conclusion of an oration in which has been developed a colossal thought, and ask us to applaud. This we cannot do, for not having followed the struggle of the new idea against opposing forces, we are unable to appreciate the import of the results.

Notwithstanding their many failures the Futurists have greatly widened the field of illustration; by a word they have given birth to a school, Simultaneism; and they have forever turned Cubism from its narrow formalism. But in themselves they were not significant. They were too stringently literary, and in attempting to advance their own theories at the expense of profounder doctrines, they have succeeded only in assisting other painters toward a greater purity of expression, despite the fact that they advocated a retrogressive objectivity. Marinetti, a poet, is the spiritual (and monetary) father of Futurism; and the names signed to the original manifesto were Umberto Boccioni, a sculptor as well as a painter; Carlo D. Carra, the most genuine artist of the group; Luigi Russolo, its most orthodox exponent; Gino Severini, its illustrator _par excellence_; and Giacomo Balla, its high priest of prettiness. In an attempt to preclude all censure, they closed their manifest with these words: "There will be those who will accuse our art of being cerebrally distorted and decadent. But we will answer simply that we are, to the contrary, the primitives of a new and centuple sensitivity, and that our art is drunk with spontaneity and power." With the slight change of "theory" for "art" we would heartily agree with them.

XIII

SYNCHROMISM

In order to understand the last step in the evolution of present-day art methods, it is necessary to be thoroughly cognizant not only of what has taken place before but of the chronological development of all the qualities of modern painting, for Synchromism embraces every aesthetic aspiration from Delacroix and Turner to Cezanne and the Cubists. At the same time it reverts to the compositions of Rubens, complicating them further to satisfy the needs of the modern mind. Delacroix took the first decided step toward making colour an organic factor in art--a factor which would help present a more homogeneous emotion of the picture as a whole, and which would be intimately connected with the picture's vital expression. He was a decided advance on those painters to whom colour was as arbitrary a means of adorning a good work as the gilt frame they placed about it. Colour with them was dictated by the demands of an age of voluptuousness and unrestrained living. The great art nations of Spain, Italy and Flanders were then passing through a sensuous epoch, and the painters reflected in their work the tone of the national temperament. The primitives of these countries and of Germany had used colour because the religious qualities in their pictures became more realistic when nature's general tints were employed. By making their work more dramatic they were able to set forth more forcibly the lesson they strove to teach. The art of the primitives was primarily dogmatic. In it was none of those subtleties of composition which come only with the conscious artist's delight in bringing order out of chaos: it contained only that simple and instinctive order which is the avoidance of chaos. That which the primitives had to say was so rudimentary and well-learned that it took a definite visional form in their minds. When dogmatism began to lose its charm for the painter his forms gradually became more suave, and his colour likewise grew gracious and ornamental. The lessons were forgotten, and composition as an element of first importance, dressed in a robe of rich and varied hue, supplanted them.

Such was the employment of colour at the advent of Delacroix whose probing mind sensed not only its importance as drama, but also its potentialities for brilliance. With him, however, it remained an adjunct to drawing--something to be applied when the rest of the picture had been laid in, an element with which to intensify the importance of subject. He gave a great and necessary impetus to its study, but he outlined no directions for its significant application: indeed, by following out his original concepts one is led into the impasse of Neo-Impressionism. But at so early a stage the impetus is the important thing, and to Delacroix belongs the credit for having set in motion the wheels of colour inquisition. It was Daumier, however, who, apparently ignoring it, brought its exclusive use appreciably nearer. By conceiving contour and form as one, he disposed, as it were, of these two elements which, in the scale of pictorial importance, had always been placed before colour. Had each successive painter profited by all the _apports_ and qualities of his direct predecessor's art, the progress of painting might have been more rapid, but it would never have been so perfect. Each painter would have inherited both the shortcomings and the merits of his forerunner. Thus one side of his art would have developed out of all proportion to the other. Daumier, going back to tone, discovered a wholly natural method for the achievement of intense form. His pictures present themselves as great bulks of flesh and matter, crude but vital, which have about them a force of actual weight. In nowise was he a colourist. He lived in a time when prettiness was the keynote of the day, and his whole life was a revolt against it. His reaction was so extreme that he disregarded the capabilities of colour.

The Impressionists, on the other hand, over-emphasised its objective uses. They held that the colour seen in nature is all-important for picture making, and proceeded to copy it. As a result their work is highly emotional, but only in the same way that a sunny landscape is emotional. These artists were the slaves of nature, doing its bidding; Gauguin bent everything into the mould of his own personality: and it is only when these two types of creative impulse combine and modify each other that great naturalistic art is possible. The Impressionists, being receptive, believed all that nature openly proclaimed. They unearthed none of its formal secrets; they probed none of its causes. Theirs was only the joy of the discoverer. But their insistence upon the discovery was important, because it helped give birth to Cezanne. He was a direct outgrowth of Impressionism, but he was also an outgrowth of art's entire history. Superficially he may seem more closely akin to Pissarro's school than to the older painters, since it was from Pissarro he learned his first colour lessons; but in reality he was more intimately related to a Giotto or a Rembrandt, because his knowledge of colour was used only to heighten the emotion of volume; and this volume, which Monet or Sisley would not have understood, was the chief concern of the old masters.

With the Impressionists colour was an end in itself. They looked upon it not merely as expressive of light, but as synonymous with light, whereas Cezanne, ignoring colour's dramatic possibilities, used it to express and intensify the fundamentals of organisation, just as Giotto, disregarding the dramatic possibilities of line, employed line as a means to ordinate volume. Cezanne is related to Daumier and Rembrandt in that while these men created their art (which was primarily one of tone) by building up volume simultaneously with contour, he created his art (which was primarily one of colour) by presenting his visions as nature presents itself to our eyes and intelligences, that is, as forms in which tone, contour and colour are inseparable. That he has been little understood is due to the fact that his profoundly logical methods took birth in an age of "inspirational" painting. Matisse who came later made of Cezanne's still-lives a highly enjoyable decoration whose destiny can rise no higher than that of tasteful and complete ornament. Cezanne's art is dynamic, while Matisse's is exaltedly excitatory. The former bears the same relation to the latter that a Beethoven symphonic movement bears to a ballet by Delibes. One inspires thought: the other incites to action, to spontaneous admiration and joy. Matisse loves and knows colour in its harmonic relations. He and Gauguin, by the broad beauty of their work, have given an impetus toward large planes of pure pigment. In brief the evolution of colour is as follows: it was used first for verity; secondly, for ornament; thirdly, for drama; fourthly, for its inherent beauty as light; and last, for intensifying natural form.

All this has to do only with the concrete side of art's progress. There is also a progress of the mental attitude which is inseparable from art's concrete development and without which its material evolution could not have gone forward significantly. This mental progress resulted in the emancipation of the artist from the intellectual limitations of his public. Up to Gericault and Delacroix painting had idealised contemporary life, had held itself to the interpretation of biblical history, or had spoken in legend and allegory. It had expressed itself in the Italian mode of drawing; it had followed set rules of balance and chiaroscuro; and above all it had possessed a very definite finish. Naturally the art historians expected this style of painting to continue indefinitely. But with Delacroix it began to change. The hard contours grew freer. The depiction of the human form halted at approximation. Drawing became more arbitrary. Then came Courbet who insisted that there was beauty in everything if one knew how to bring it forth. He turned to the commonplace life about him for inspiration, repudiated the suavities of David, the romance of Delacroix, the elegance of Velazquez and the colour of Veronese; and began to order realistic nature. About his name there grew up a tempest of adverse criticism; but no man so sure of his own genius as was Courbet could be weakened by public condemnation; and he made no compromise. Manet continued Courbet's freedom of selection and painted _n'importe quoi_. The Impressionists also carried forward this modern attitude. They sought for that which generally was considered ugly, and made it artistically enjoyable by drenching it with light and colour. Then came Cezanne, Matisse, the Cubists and the Futurists, with each of whom subject-matter became more and more emancipated. Natural objects gradually lost their importance and grew more abstract. Form was considered for its own sake, and models were not copied merely because they filled certain utilitarian destinies in the spectator's mind. Objects were used by Cezanne to create abstract ensembles. In Matisse the form itself became more purely aesthetic, though with him there was a residue of objectivity for the sake of illustrative consistency. With the Cubists natural form was an echo, a memory of life, retained because they were not sure of how to turn their minds away from it. Futurism attempted a rehabilitation of illustration, but lately it has been converted into a purer vision by the Cubists.

To sum up: colour reached its highest development in Cezanne; composition attained its highest intensity in Rubens; and the greatest freedom in material form was represented by the Cubists. Thus the art of painting stood in 1912. But at that time the development of modern means had not reached its highest point. The purification of painting had not been attained. The tendencies of the past century fell short of realisation. As yet there had been no abstract coalition of colour, form and composition. Colour had not been carried to its ultimate purity as a functioning element. Form had become almost unrecognisable but had just missed abstraction, its inevitable goal. And composition, the basis of all great art, had been temporarily abjured in the feverish search for new methods. The step from the condition of art in 1912 to its final purity, in which would be embodied all the qualities necessary to the greatest compositional painting, was not a long one, but until it was taken the cycle must remain incomplete. The last advance in modern methods was made by the Synchromists at _Der Neue Kunstsalon_ of Munich in June, 1913. This movement was fathered by Morgan Russell and S. Macdonald-Wright, both of whom, though native Americans, were partially European in parentage and education. Russell is more than half French, and Macdonald-Wright, whose family name is Van Vranken, is directly descended from the Dutch.

Russell first studied in New York under Robert Henri, one of the most sincere and intelligent products of American art. There he acquired a sound and capable foundation for his later work both in clay and paint. He then went to Paris, still feeling nature through the inspiration of Manet, and like Manet fell under the sway of Monet. From the Impressionists he was attracted to Matisse with whom he was personally acquainted. He did many canvases attractive in colour and competent as to form, as well as a number of synthetic and obviously disproportioned statues which recall the modern "Fauve" to a marked degree. Later he began to take an interest in Cezanne, and to his study of this master and of Michelangelo is attributable his later development in colour and composition. These men constituted his main influences; but in the course of his development he had cast a glance at Picasso and even at the Futurists; and it is a significant commentary on their methods that they are more susceptible of understanding than either Renoir or Matisse. Leo Stein, an astute and discerning connoisseur of the more modern art movements and a man who can see with occasional flashes of genius through the aspects of a canvas to its basic cause, no doubt had much to do with Russell's rapid intellectual progress through the discipleship of the student to the creation of individual endeavours.